- Controversial transcription startup Rev announced it would raise prices for on-demand transcriptions to $1.25 from $1 per minute of audio.
- Rev is a startup that employs 100% contract labor to carry out the transcription work.
- Last year, Rev slashed base pay for some audio files by 33% in mid November, leading contractors to call out the company for unfair wage cuts. The company has not raised the price of audio from $1 since it launched in 2011, sources told Business Insider.
- Contractors told Business Insider that they make less than what the company advertises, due to working extra time to parse together low-quality audio and understand complicated topics.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Startup Rev has increased prices for customers for the first time in nearly a decade amid controversy that it underpays its gig workforce.
In November 2019, Rev, a transcription service that exclusively uses contract labor, decreased pay by 33% for easy files, while increasing pay by 45% for harder jobs. The pay cuts were among several that took place since the company launched in 2011, former and current transcriptionists told Business Insider.
Rev announced on Wednesday it would start charging customers 25 cents more per minute of audio, increasing costs to $1.25 from $1, according to an email the company sent to clients. Despite cutting pay for contractors several times, this is the first time the company raised prices for customers. Rev confirmed to Business Insider that this is the first time the startup has raised prices since 2011.
The price change will go into effect on March 2, the email said. Rev attributed the price increase to its "insistence on innovation," including artificial intelligence that transcribes audio. The company also sent an email to gig transcriptionists that said Rev will eventually raise wages, but hadn't outlined a specific plan.
How widespread criticism of Rev's business practices spread through social media
Customers of Rev started a petition on November 11 calling for Rev's CEO Jason Chicola to pay freelance workers fairly for the time they put into transcribing. The petition is looking for 600 signatures, and has gotten over 500 at the time of this article.
After a viral Twitter thread detailed the pay decrease, many customers called for Rev to increase wages or pledged to stop using the service entirely.
"Stop using @rev until they pay workers fairly," tweeted Molly Lambert and host of the Night Call podcast.
stop using @rev until they pay workers fairly https://t.co/EwPfvYVnzF
— Molly Lambert 🦔 (@mollylambert) November 11, 2019
Business Insider spoke with more than a dozen former and current contractors for Rev, who all said they were paid less than what the company advertised. On its website, Rev advertises paying transcriptionists $0.24 to $0.90 per minute of audio.
But contractors say that figure does not take into account the time they spend researching difficult topics in audio files, double-checking the work, and parsing bad-quality audio. When considering the total labor put into transcribing, multiple contractors estimated they earned $5 an hour. One said she received just $0.20 per minute at times, and another said she spent 20 hours working on a two-hour long presentation for a graduate pharmacy college.
"It's so difficult to put in so much work and see so little outcome," Lilia Dronyayeva, a former Rev contract worker from Texas, told Business Insider. "You have to be so well versed in such a broad variety of subjects — you have to be able to memorize hundreds of things. It's a hard job."
Business Insider reached out to Rev for comment on this article. Rev could not get answers to some questions raised regarding pay in previous reporting.
Read Business Insider's full investigation of how Rev treats its freelance transcriptionists and captionists »
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